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A drone of discontentment

The late Duchess of Windsor, the most compelling antiheroine of the last century, has been getting a literary airing this year, first in Laurie Graham’s sharply entertaining novel, Gone with the Windsors, and now, more sympathetically, in the title story of Rose Tremain’s collection of mordantly perceptive tales. Tremain’s Wallis Simpson is at the end of her life and in the worst possible state: sane enough to know that she ’s losing what is left of her mind.

In her prime a cross between Scarlett O’Hara and Lady Macbeth, Wallis is now a shaky crone, locked in her dark Paris bedroom by her thuggish lawyer, who won’t let her die until she’s delivered up a saleable version of the past, a narrative that a door-stepping journalist imagines to be “the most breathtaking story since the Resurrection”. But although Wallis